Hyppy writes: Microsoft COO Kevin Turner has received multiple correspondences from Apple requesting that Microsoft cease their new ad campaign. From the article: "Turner said Apple's legal eagles tried to depict the ads as inaccurate.
'Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices,' Turner quoted Apple's attorneys as saying. 'They took like $100 off or something,' said Turner. 'It was the single greatest phone call in history that I've ever taken in business.'"

roundisfunny writes: As part of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 trip to the moon, the JFK Library has setup a website that will re-enact the launch in real-time over the next couple of days. Check it out on http://wechoosethemoon.org/ — live Twitter feeds available if requested.

PaGeN writes: After 40 Years, the better quality video of the moon landing finally gets shown. NASA, after prompting from NPR, has completed an exhaustive effort to find the better quality video originally recorded in 1969. The degraded video was created when the high quality video was converted to 1969 broadcast quality TV. Thought lost for the last 40 years, NASA has now compiled better video it is now begining to share. The link is to NPR and has text of the story, audio broadcast, and parts of the video released today. NASA link on the 40th anniversery of the Moon Landing can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_landing/index.html.

Gammu writes: Google was incorporated in late 1998 and after only two years became so popular that it replaced the in-house search engine on the most popular website on the Internet. Google won its popularity through the quality of its search results and because of its management. In an era of spendthrift Internet startups, Google controlled costs and grew slowly (at least in terms of employees. Read more at Low End Mac.

An anonymous reader writes: According to the Seattle Times and Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, an Apple lawyer called him asking the company to stop running recent ads revolving around the differing price points between PCs and Macs. Why? Because Apple lowered prices.
"It was the greatest single phone call that I've ever taken in the history of business," Turner said in a presentation at the Microsoft Worldwide Partners Conference in New Orleans. "I did cartwheels down the hallway."
I assume some lawyer in Cupertino is probably offering his liver to Jobs right about now...

An anonymous reader writes: Kevin Turner, Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer, told partners during his Worldwide Partner Conference keynote not only about the upcoming Microsoft Stores this fall that will be beside Apple stores but also about how Apple's lawyers wanted Microsoft to take down their Laptop Hunter ads. Here's the story he told (keep in mind that it's coming from a Microsoft executive): 'And you know why I know they're working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, "Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices." They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I've ever taken in business.'

Gammu writes: After leaving Palm (after years of mismanagement and interference by its parent company, 3COM) Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins founded Handspring. To the outside world, Handspring appeared to be an ordinary PDA company, releasing the well respected Visor with its SpringBoard slot and enhanced software, but in reality, it was a communications company in disguise. Visor sales helped finance the development and marketing of a new flagship product, the Treo. After two generations of Treos were released, Palm acquired Handspring and adopted the 'communicator' strategy, continuing to release new revisions of the original Handspring design. Read the full history of Handspring and the Treo at Silicon User.

Gammu writes: The Pilot (later PalmPilot and finally just Palm) saved Palm Computing. Before the release of the Pilot, the company was subsisting (barely) on revenue from connectivity packages for HP PDA's and a version of Graffiti for the Newton. This was because its first PDA hardware product had failed under the weight of feature creep and design by committee. Read about Palm's early history at SiliconUser.

Gammu writes: The idea of syndicating audio content via the Internet was not new in 2002 when the first podcasts debuted. Originally implemented by radio stations looking to cut costs by having a national catalog instead of creating a new one for every market, audio syndication as an open Internet standard was born by developers exchanging ideas on the brand new RSS on a free Yahoo! message board. It would take years for the idea to be implemented but when it was, podcasting (as it was called) experienced meteoric growth. Now, everybody from Apple to Microsoft to NPR support podcasting in one form or another, a far cry from its humble roots as a research project at Apple (and eventually Netscape) during the mid-nineties.

Gammu writes: The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts.

Gammu writes: During the mid-nineties, Mac users were prone to dealing with poorly-trained and ill-maintained Mac sections in big box computers and electronics stores. These environments did not foster customer loyalty nor did they help differentiate the Mac user-experience from Windows. After Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he began a concerted campaign to help sales by improving the presentation of Macs. This campaign culminated with the development and introduction of the Apple Stores in 2001.

Gammu writes: Podcasting can trace its history back to 1996, but only really emerged in 2004. The concept of metadata was first applied to HTML by Apple and the concept was refined at Netscape. Netscape's metadata standard (RDF) was eventually adapted to syndicate content on major websites like My Netscape and David Winer's Scripting News. A little noticed feature in the RDF standard, containers, allowed website owners 'push' music files to subscribers. After a proof of concept post by David, Podcasting took off in a big way.

Gammu writes: For the past thirty years, many children have been raised with a heavy diet MECC games like Oregon Trail, Odell Lake and Lemonade Stand. These products weren't developed by a major game developer. Rather, they were developed by the state of Minnesota for use in their schools. What began as an initiative to get Minnesota students ready for the micro-computer age turned into a multi-million dollar a year business whose products are still used in US schools even a decade after MECC was sold off to another developer. Read about the history of MECC (and especially Oregon Trail) at Silicon User.